Robert Silverberg is a masterly science fiction writer who has demonstrated the capacity of the genre to encompass and enrich the themes of the traditional realistic novel. He quickly developed the qualities that made him a very successful purveyor of commercial science fiction: the ability to grasp a reader's attention with his opening sentences, to sustain a compelling narrative, to evoke character and setting vividly and swiftly, to generate and elaborate fascinating ideas. He has carried these qualities into his later work, and they have been complemented, in his best novels and short stories, by characterization in depth and by a prose style that is rhythmically resourceful and rich in allusion and imagery.

Silverberg is especially concerned with time and death; with journeys to, and visions of, past and future; and with attempts to avoid or overcome mortality. For instance, Recalled to Life, by means of imaginative extrapolations from American society in the second half of the twentieth century, vividly dramatizes the social, political, and ethical consequences of the discovery of a scientific means of resurrecting the newly dead. To Live Again evokes a world that offers the wealthy not physical immortality but the survival, in recorded form, of a persona that can be transplanted into the mind of a living individual: The individual chooses the persona that will best complement her or him, but there is always the risk that the persona may take over. By means of a science fiction hypothesis, To Live Again recasts and extends the traditional theme of the divided self.

The Book of Skulls may be Silverberg's most powerful dramatization of the quest for immortality. Four American students—one Jewish, one gay, one a WASP, and one an upwardly mobile Kansas farmer's boy—set out on a journey to Arizona to find a sect they believe can grant them immortality. There is one drawback: Only two students will be eligible; they must kill the third student, and the
fourth must kill himself. They do not know, however, who is to die and who is to be saved. The novel is a compelling combination of a science fiction story and a thriller, the suspense of which is increased by a narrative technique that alternates between first-person accounts by each student. This technique also enables Silverberg to offer complex psychological portrayals of each of his four protagonists.

The combination of complex psychological characterization with science fiction achieves possibly its greatest success in Dying Inside, a novel about a middle-aged Jewish telepath, David Selig, who is losing his powers. The novel combines memories of Selig's unhappy childhood and youth with an evocation of his present life, in which he ekes out a living by ghostwriting essays for students. Selig laments the loss of his gift, even though it has been more of a curse than a blessing, isolating him from his fellows and thwarting his hopes of forming enduring relationships. At times we might be reading a realistic novel; but the science fiction element adds an extra dimension, Selig's telepathic power serving as a metaphor for intensity of emotion and for a faculty of perception that makes one special but sets one apart.

Silverberg's fiction grew less intense in the 1970s, when he produced novels and short stories about the fantasy world of Majipoor and historical novels like Lord of Darkness. As he entered the 1990s, he could still produce very effective work, such as Thebes of the Hundred Gates, which combines elements of a science fiction story and an historical novel in its tale of a time traveler returning to ancient Thebes in search of two other travelers who have gone missing. Silverberg vividly evokes the sights, sounds, and smells of ancient Egypt, but the novel is more than a skillful rhetorical construction. It poses, once again, a question often raised in his previous work: whether to choose the past or the future. Some of his most notable earlier fiction, despite its pessimistic projections, ended on a progressive note: The choice was made for the future, despite all its perils. Sorcerers of Majipoor, the fifth novel in that series, concerns the question of who will succeed the Pontifex, ruler of Majipoor. Yet again the theme is the future, but in The Alien Years, which uses elements of Silverberg's 1986 short story "The Pardoner's Tale," the future looks bleak indeed: invaded by hostile aliens, Earth is plunged into darkness as technology breaks down, and the Carmichael family is forced to survive in a mountain redoubt.

Although he has been highly praised, Silverberg has not won promotion to the ranks of a significant contemporary novelist as quickly and easily as some other science fiction writers, such as Philip K. Dick or William Gibson. His overwhelming productivity, as well as his continued willingness to publish fiction that is highly competent but not ostentatiously literary, may have inhibited the growth of his serious reputation. In the 1990s, however, it is possible to take stock of his work and to see that it comprises a substantial, and sometimes outstanding, contribution to modern fiction.

—Nicolas Tredell

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